10/26/2010

05/25/2010

Sun Ra would have turned 96, in earth years, last Saturday. Marshall Allen, who has led the Sun Ra Arkestra for some 15 years (and played in its ranks for more than 50), turns 86 today. According to recent custom, Allen and the band will perform a birthday gig, in their hometown of Philadelphia, under the aegis of the Ars Nova Workshop. In honor of all of this, here is a piece I wrote for a Style magazine in Philly last year, which provided me with a pretext for interviewing both George Clinton and Maurice White for the first time.

There are worlds, and there are worlds. For the visionary
composer, keyboardist, philosopher, bandleader and intergalactic traveler known
as Sun Ra, the planet was a way station, and music was both a vessel and a
channel. Throughout his earthly career, which roughly spanned the second half
of the last century, he engaged an impossibly broad-spectrum sweep of musical
ideas: big band swing and bebop along with future-sound electronics and ancient
African rhythms, funk and free jazz, psychedelic grooves and Bizarro doo-wop,
and much, much else besides. “It was a universal music,” attests George
Clinton, the Parliament-Funkadelic mastermind with an intergalactic angle of
his own. “There’s no box you can put it in, except that it makes you feel
good.”

So is it any wonder that in the 16 years since Sun Ra’s
departure, his influence has rippled across so many borders of culture and
genre? When soul-punk dynamo Janelle Monáe declares herself “an alien from
outer space,” or hip-hop trickster Lil Wayne rantsabout being a Martian,
they’re riding a wavelength best exemplified, if not generated, by the potent
precedent of Sun Ra. And those are just the more flagrant manifestations of a
process that reaches meaningfully into the worlds of rock, techno and
electronica, along with avant-garde jazz and new music. “He never got as much
recognition, even posthumously, as he should have,” says Jeff Parker, the
guitarist for Tortoise, the acclaimed Chicago post-rock band. “But the
influence, man, it’s everywhere.”